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Why is Microsoft Making its Own Life Difficult?
sebFlyte asks: "Asking Slashdot readers what they think of Microsoft's methodology and ethos might seem like a silly thing to do, but a ZD-Net article raises some interesting points. The main one is that: 'Microsoft's behaviour is technically, morally and practically indefensible. It could publish its CIFS specification tomorrow if it so chose, an act that would correspond closely to the spirit and letter of the European decision. The company would then be free to compete through the simple process of making better products, something it claims to favour, while also encouraging precisely the sort of interoperability it says is missing.' The question I'm curious to canvas opinion on is why Microsoft is taking an attitude that is believed by so many to be damaging to their market position."
I'm going to go with incompetence.
It's about power and domination, period.
Look at their attitudes from the beginning. They can never accept simple success. They only consider themselves successful when they have destroyed the competition. They have never competed on the quality of their product, or on a level playing field. They compete by force, like buying out their opposition, or giving away products until the opposition goes broke.
While they like the money, it's about a small group of men at the top who want nothing more than to rule the world.
At least on the desktop. They're seriously not worried about alternatives because A. they're harder to use for people already used to using Windows, or B. they're more expensive.
Microsoft's corporate culture, from day one, has been to "game" the system, treat the source as the family jewels and play fast and loose with truth and rules. I honestly believe that they don't know how to behave any differently. Just as Gates used university time on the mainframe to develop his first product then condemned the hobbyists that distributed a few copies, the corporation was built on taking as much out of the community and giving as little back as possible.
BTW, I am aware of Gates' philanthropic endeavors and that's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about how he treats his customers and the computing industry in general.
"Eve of Destruction", it's not just for old hippies anymore...
You're making the assumption that Microsoft truly believes what they say about interoperability and whatnot. Also that they believe they're still capable of making better products. If either (or both) of those assumptions is incorrect, then it might be safe to say they're blowing smoke while going right on doing what they've always done, and knowingly so.
Look, reporters, critics, journals, haters, and analysts have been claiming similar things for decades now. Who gives a shit what they say? It's always, "Microsoft will not be able to sustain the growth of product X" and BAM, that product ends up dominating the market. Or maybe it's that, "Establishing overseas labs will hinder MS's development" and BAM, they end up doing much better as a result. Or it's, "Certain law suits or patents will come back to bite MS in the ass" and BAM, they are settled and MS gets even stronger. This is no different. Anyone on the sidelines, no matter how credible, can make whatever claims they want to fulfill whatever agendas that they may have. Microsoft isn't full of idiots: idiots do not build, sustain, and grow - over the span of 25 years - the largest and most powerful software company - or among ANY group of companies, for that matter. They know full well what they're doing. Their financial track record is a proof of that.
It may comfort you to read articles which portray Microsoft in some sort of a downfall or crossroads, but we know that's because you're an OSS fanboy and you hate Microsoft.
A blog like any other.
Because they have to - it's the strategy they have been following and it's a strategy too difficult to change quickly. Too many people are entrenched in their decison and those people don't want to admit that their way leads to a dead end. From their perspective it's just business, which is really just a complex game to them, and so it's better to crash and burn than admit that someone else has a better method.
(Sponsored by cheeseSource for President 2012)
As much as I or others on /. rail against MS for various practices that end up costing users money, causing vendor lock-in and upgrade treadmills, the company did not get where it is today by acting foolishly.
All of their recent actions and behavior is consistent with maximizing shareholder return.
If conditions change, either regulatory (EU, DOJ monitoring, broadcast flags), technical (TCPA) or marketplace (Linux, Oracle, IBM) I would count on them adjusting their strategy to continue to maximize long-term revenue, pure and simple.
"Provided by the management for your protection."
...are moths drawn to the flame? ...do lemmings jump off of cliffs? ...do I answer the support line at work? ...did I get married? ...do I sit here and refresh slashdot all day?
I suspect, many questions can all be answered the same. >:P
Karma: Chameleon (mostly due to the fact that you come and go).
The question I'm curious to canvas opinion on is why Microsoft is taking an attitude that is believed by so many to be damaging to their market position.
Because their actions have not been damaging to their market position; they have succeeded wildly with those tactics. Why should they change? What could they possibly gain from a change in strategy that they don't already have? "Good feeling"? "Competitive instincts"? You can't take either of those to the bank.
The only interesting question is: if, and this is a big if, if they they ever find themselves to be losing marketshare in a substantial way, will they be able to move fast enough to change and adapt? or will they maintain their mantra to the end?
And by substantial, I don't mean FireFox and it's 3%--I mean, for a serious threat to emerge, it would have to be somewhere above 20% of the market Microsoft wants to own. Otherwise it's just an outlier.
--
$tar -xvf
Keep in mind that Bill Gates didn't start the company by writing an OS, he did it by buying one. He changed the way everything thinks about software and making IP the most important part of doing business. It's not about better software, it's about better technology. It's about using the tools you and only you are privy to to edge out other people.
I've never heard of any program that was actually written by Gates. Whatever he knows about programming is marginal compared to what he knows about protecting the implementation. If releasing any information about how MS processes data or how its IP works is required in order to publish a truly open standard then there's no way they would ever do it without fighting tooth and nail.
New technologies may be exciting and the ideas behind them may be easily understood, but they're considered property by many people and any action that abridges that property right will be frowned upon. Bill Gates seems to think he's John Galt, but none of Ayn Rand's supermen were as prone to error as Microsoft has been. He lost his chance at immortality when his company started using clout instead of new ideas to beat out the competition.
Direct away from face when opening.
greed and stupidity
the rich play, the poor pay
...they're not a bunch of smelly, disgusting communists. Tee hee!
It doesn't matter whether Microsoft is really interoperable or not. Nor does it matter how secure the OS is, or how stable it is, or anything like that.
How can this be? Because 99% of the population either doesn't know or doesn't care. All they hear is Bill Gates saying "We are focusing on security" or "We are focusing on interoperability", and that's what sticks.
Whether or not the security or interoperability are actually addressed is irrelevant - the terms have been associated with Microsoft in peoples' minds. All it takes is some repetition and maybe an ad campaign or two to drive it home. Then in six months, some poll will come out saying that people associate Microsoft with interoperable products.
And that's what it's all about, boys and girls.
Only a small minority of customers cares about open source and interoperatability- the grand majority couldn't give a damn. Therefore the greater profit is in closed source and cheap labor- so that's what the behemouths will do.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
This is my first /. posting in gosh knows when- I get fired up, see all the posts, and say, screw it.
But this subject is one of my premier hot button issues.
I don't understand it. If you're confident in your product, trust in that confidence- don't use obfuscated file formats to cause interoperability problems.
The only thing I can think of that keeps this anti-customer attitude going is corporate culture. Off the top of my head, Lotus and Autodesk seem comparable, in their persistence with a worldview. Lotus, at the beginning and for quite a while, used copy protection methods. They'd not use them for a while, but pretty soon, they'd come back again. Autodesk has gone back and forth on using dongles (or at least, until 10 years ago they had- my cad days are behind me.)
Corporate cultures seem to have memes associated with them, and Microsoft's appears to be one of paranoia- regardless of the quality of their products.
I'm Microsoft certified. I even can say I like Word, minus clippit, and I even think XP has its merits. I even think, with Server 2003's installation and granularity, they might even be getting a clue.
But they make it damned hard to stick up for them, and until they open up items such as file formats to all takers, it will be useless to measure the quality of their products.
stored on computers from birth to the grave
Opening up CIFS, or the file specifications for their Office suite, or their ABI spec would really cut into much of their FUD. This is a good part of any dominant player's business model (I won't limit this stritctly to monopolistic behavior). A perfect example is the IBM/Wang situation, where IBM flung FUD about lack of the Wang's compatibility (which was simply untrue). In the end, IBM's sales stayed strong, and Wang went the way of...well...Wang. Microsoft does the same thing with their proporitary formats. "Sure, you can use a Samba server, but are sure you want to entrust your network to a hack of our 'real' stuff?". Same deal with OpenOffice.org (Microsoft actually published some FUD about this, which I can't seem to find) -- Microsoft basically said "Yeah, it'll probably work, but wouldn't you rather have a guarantee than a reverse-engineered hack of our stuff? Besides, you don't get Access with Oo.o, and you need that. You'll also have to shell out to pay to retrain your employees. Lost productivity!"
Actually opening this stuff up would likely cause a major shift in their FUD activities. A good thing, perhaps...but asking why they don't do it is asking why someone hasn't opened up another hole in their head yet. Because it'll hurt!
-Turkey
"Programmers at Work," Susan Lammers, Microsoft Press, 1986, ISBN 0-914845-71-3, happens to be a darn good book even if it does have a chapter about Gates. It has a number of pages of printout (pp. 70, 348-352) of a listing by GATES/ALLEN/DAVIDOFF of the original 8080 BASIC interpreter, and a page in Gates' handwriting, p. 353, "Storage layout for BASIC."
It all looks perfectly workmanlike to me. I haven't gone over it with a fine-toothed comb judging how good it is compared to, uh, the code I was writing in 1978, but I think Bill Gates knows how to program.
It also has some magazine article he wrote in 1975 about tricky coding to squeeze algorithms into as few memory locations as possible.
The book also has code and handwritten material by Andy Hertzfeld, Gary Kildall, Butler Lampson, Jonathan Sachs, and, yes, Charles Simonyi (with address labels named PRPLC, PRPLC1, ERRPRP, PRPLC2, PRPLC3, and variables named PNCTP, PRPLLC, PRPLCN, BPESCC. Crystal clear.)
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
It's the lawyers. Laywers aren't in the business of selling a product, all they know how to do is create problems. Really. Find your own problems before the other guys does to keep him from suing you, and find his before he does so you can sue him. It isn't about productivity, it's about extortion. Some lawyers will still consider the productivity benefits of serving their clients, corporate lawyers have lost even that small incentive to be business smart.
A lawyer doesn't think in terms of right or wrong, good or evil, ethical or unethical. They think in terms of the costs of going to court. If the costs of getting sued is less than the benefits of violating your copyright or patent, they will do so. Conversely, if the costs of suing you into bankruptcy are sufficiently high, they won't sue you.
The reason Microsoft is acting like a bunch of spoiled children is because they have too many lawyers working for them.
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
Let's see: Windows is sold on nearly every x86 computer sold in a store. Office is the de facto standard for the business & academic world. Internet Explorer (like it or not) has a market dominance of over 90%. My guess is that they can take pretty much any attitude they want, cuz they're not going anywhere now or any time soon. As long as they hold onto the "Get Windows With Any PC Purchased!", known affectionately as the Microsoft Tax, their "market position" is going to remain where it has for the past twenty years - dominating everybody else.
Condemnant quod non intellegunt.
They want to maximize return. (Not shareholder return -- except for Gates & friends, I doubt they give a damn about shareholders.)
In order to do that, they will adapt as best they can to the current situation. With Bush in office in the US and the EU slow to react, they see the best course of action to be what they have always done: play the game.
Buy the competition, sue the competition, undercut the competition with vaporware or bundling, lie about the competition, steal ideas from the competition...
You're right, they are not acting "foolish" in a purely business way, but they also don't give a damn about society, much less shareholders, who would be better off investing in redhat in an MS-free world.
So, yes, they cost users money, cause vendor lock-in and upgrade treadmills, and produce shoddy software until there's some scary-looking competition. None of this is foolish. But none of it is ethical or necessary for anything other than dominating the world.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
The alternatives just haven't hit on a really good strategy yet.
Let's suppose that most computers are bought by either gamers or people who use Word/email/web/IM. We have damn good alternatives to Word/Outlook/IE/MSNIM, and reasonably good alternatives to things like ACT and various niche business-oriented things.
That leaves gaming. When you buy a new box, what game do you want to play? How well do you want to play it? Gamers probably won't settle for wine/cedega, due to slowness/bugginess (teh fps!). So, what to people play on Windows?
I can count the really popular Windows-only game companies on one hand: Valve, Blizzard, SoE, Square, and EA. So, getting them all to port would kill MS. Only problem is, Valve includes a lot of former MS guys who (typical MS) don't care how much they abuse the PC/user/community so long as you can get good screenshots, so they'd be the last to make the port.
That about wraps it up. I think that even a port of Steam/Source would be enough to make a company successful selling new boxes loaded with (say) Linux, especially if they bundled a few apps/games with them that the big guys (Dell, etc) don't, or if they supported some new, faster processor that wasn't x86 compatible.
From then on, it would cascade through the industry. After my own fictional company's market share started to pick up, first HP and then Dell would start selling similar packages. With enough of a user base (50/50 is "enough"), software developers would start writing for Linux, and if it's as good as I think it is, the quality of the end result would either crush Microsoft or force it to (again) improve drastically, which wouldn't be so bad.
Of course, though this plan doesn't require the cooperation of everyone all at once, it requires the coordination of a few major players (chip designers, game developers), and it's not certain even if I got that cooperation. Still, saying "Microsoft is never going to go away" is like saying "Kerafyrm will never die." It took a lot of cooperation, but he did, eventually.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
I think they're keenly aware of how they can be hurt. And I think that one of those things is loosing control of their own standards. It's how they killed giants. And they just aren't in the good feelings for the customers of free software business. And the companies that are in that business, are HUGE they might not have Microsofts margins but they have that kind of muscle. They'd be stupid to want to see those world's collide, and there's nothing but dubious speculation to suggest it'd be a big win for Joe User.
.doc standard, they are in DEEP shit. And as long as they can make sure the products from the wrong side of the tracks are hard to use and work under only a limited set of circumstances, but are completely viable as an option for those with "the knack" they're safe.
Microsoft products have their problems. But they do a few things well. They're easy to use, pretty stable, and they work well in concert. Of those, the one I would think they're most worried about is working well in concert. If Microsoft isn't the defacto standard in Microsoft formats, and they get into the position where their upgrade of Word 2010 is percieved to break the then
They're no more evil than any other giant company. They just have an appearently built in defense against complacency, and never lost their tenaciousness. So while they're not any less moral or ethical, they are more dangerous.
They have never competed on the quality of their product
Not quite.
Only when MS has to compete on quality do they. Much of the time they're not constrainted to do so. Otherwise, there are other agendas to pursue, such as market domination and extending the customer in "Solutions" that are entirely MS.
[Likewise, only when they have to provide open interoperability, do they. Marketing programs saying nice-sounding buzzwords are usually more their style.]
I rail against MS all the time for their many faults, but they have produced quality products at least a few times:
"Provided by the management for your protection."
My point is, maybe the only useful spec is the code, which MS is unlikely to share.
(Anyone able to find the quote?)
You are a discount private investigator?
Sometimes seventeen/Syllables aren't enough to/Express a complete
I have a few MS shares acquired wehen they bought out a good company I had shares in. Since then, their shares have dropped to about 1/4 to 1/3 what they were worth nominally when the by-out occured. They haven't moved much since they dropped. They did begin paying a dividend, but its trivial. IBM is a better investment and has been for years.